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Does Wayland work on non-Linux systems (e.g. *BSD)? If an application is written for Wayland, is there a way to send its windows to (e.g.) my Mac, like I can w

Does Wayland work on non-Linux systems (e.g. *BSD)? If an application is written for Wayland, is there a way to send its windows to (e.g.) my Mac, like I can with X11 to XQuartz?

mghackerlady 9mo ago
Wayland works pretty well on FreeBSD and I know at least wlroots compositors work a bit on OpenBSD (though, I suspect anyone on OpenBSD would prefer to use their homegrown Xenocara). There are Wayland compositors for Mac, the youtuber Brodie Robertson did a good overview of them a few days ago
torstenvl 9mo ago
Yes, but still kind of WIP. https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/wayland/ https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/wayland/
ux266478 9mo ago
It depends on what you mean by send. Wayland doesn't have network transparency, there's a bit of a song and dance you have to do to get that working properly. I'm not sure the state of that or of Wayland compositors in general on Mac.
- throw0101a 9mo ago
  > It depends on what you mean by send. Currently I can: $ ssh -X somehost xeyes and get a window on macOS.
  - NoGravitas 9mo ago
    Today you would do: `$ waypipe ssh somehost foot` You need waypipe installed on both machines. For the Mac, I guess you'll need something like cocoa-way (https://github.com/J-x-Z/cocoa-way https://github.com/J-x-Z/cocoa-way). Some local Wayland compositor, anyway.
  - gf000 9mo ago
    For xeyes that works. It is absolutely an inferior and chatty protocol for any other application though, like try to watch a youtube video in chrome through it. X's network transparency was made at a time when we drawn two lines as UI, and for that it works very well. But today even your Todo app has a bunch of icons that are just bitmaps to X, and we can transfer those via much better means (that should probably not be baked into a display protocol). I think Wayland did the correct decision here. Just be a display protocol that knows about buffers and that's it. User space can then just transport buffers in any way they seem fit. Also, another interesting note, the original X network transparency's modern analogue might very well be the web, if you look at it squinted. And quite a few programs just simply expose a localhost port to avoid the "native GUI" issue wholesale.
    - throw0101a 9mo ago
      > For xeyes that works. It is absolutely an inferior and chatty protocol for any other application though, like try to watch a youtube video in chrome through it. I used run and use diskless SparcStation 5s with remote X on 10BASE2 network with the binaries running on Sun E3500s: it worked well enough for non-video web sites running Netscape 3.x. Also Matlab, Octave, Emacs, Vi(m), etc. I've used it to run backup application GUIs when I was still on DSL (<25Mbps) displaying at home many years ago, and it worked well then. I now have >100Mbps fibre at home, so doubt that bandwidth (or even latency) is worse.
      - gf000 9mo ago
        Well, we are using much higher resolutions with much higher frame rates and with more media-rich content. You surely agree that not having a good compression here is less than ideal. And it begs the question whether this is indeed the task of the display manager, or it's packing an unrelated functionality that could be better solved by another software. And we haven't even gotten to sound - should a display manager now suddenly also handle sound?
        saurik 9mo ago
        Of all the things that seem useful to conflate, audio and video does make sense to me, as they so often need to be synchronized. Hell: many monitors also support audio, all televisions do, and the cables used to connect them carry both signals.
jeroenhd 9mo ago
Microsoft's WSL2 GUI integration works based on Wayland (and XWayland): https://github.com/microsoft/wslg https://github.com/microsoft/wslg Rather than going fully protocol-based (like Waypipe), they used Weston to render to RDP. Using RDP's "remote apps" functionality, practically any platform can render the windows. I think it's a pretty clever solution, one perhaps even better than plain X11 forwarding (which breaks all kinds of things like GPU acceleration). I don't know if anyone has messed with this enough to get it to work like plain old RemoteApps for macOS/BSD/Windows/Linux, but the technology itself is clearly ready for it.
johnny22 9mo ago
It is in freebsd's official handbook, and the openbsd folks have been playing around with it since 2023 at least https://xenocara.org/Wayland_on_OpenBSD.html https://xenocara.org/Wayland_on_OpenBSD.html I'm not sure how much farther along they are than that post though.

Does Wayland work on non-Linux systems (e.g. *BSD)? If an application is written for Wayland, is there a way to send its windows to (e.g.) my Mac, like I can with X11 to XQuartz?

mghackerlady 9mo ago

Wayland works pretty well on FreeBSD and I know at least wlroots compositors work a bit on OpenBSD (though, I suspect anyone on OpenBSD would prefer to use their homegrown Xenocara). There are Wayland compositors for Mac, the youtuber Brodie Robertson did a good overview of them a few days ago

torstenvl 9mo ago

Yes, but still kind of WIP. https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/wayland/ https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/wayland/

ux266478 9mo ago

It depends on what you mean by send. Wayland doesn't have network transparency, there's a bit of a song and dance you have to do to get that working properly. I'm not sure the state of that or of Wayland compositors in general on Mac.

throw0101a 9mo ago
> It depends on what you mean by send. Currently I can: $ ssh -X somehost xeyes and get a window on macOS.
- NoGravitas 9mo ago
  Today you would do: `$ waypipe ssh somehost foot` You need waypipe installed on both machines. For the Mac, I guess you'll need something like cocoa-way (https://github.com/J-x-Z/cocoa-way https://github.com/J-x-Z/cocoa-way). Some local Wayland compositor, anyway.
- gf000 9mo ago
  For xeyes that works. It is absolutely an inferior and chatty protocol for any other application though, like try to watch a youtube video in chrome through it. X's network transparency was made at a time when we drawn two lines as UI, and for that it works very well. But today even your Todo app has a bunch of icons that are just bitmaps to X, and we can transfer those via much better means (that should probably not be baked into a display protocol). I think Wayland did the correct decision here. Just be a display protocol that knows about buffers and that's it. User space can then just transport buffers in any way they seem fit. Also, another interesting note, the original X network transparency's modern analogue might very well be the web, if you look at it squinted. And quite a few programs just simply expose a localhost port to avoid the "native GUI" issue wholesale.
  - throw0101a 9mo ago
    > For xeyes that works. It is absolutely an inferior and chatty protocol for any other application though, like try to watch a youtube video in chrome through it. I used run and use diskless SparcStation 5s with remote X on 10BASE2 network with the binaries running on Sun E3500s: it worked well enough for non-video web sites running Netscape 3.x. Also Matlab, Octave, Emacs, Vi(m), etc. I've used it to run backup application GUIs when I was still on DSL (<25Mbps) displaying at home many years ago, and it worked well then. I now have >100Mbps fibre at home, so doubt that bandwidth (or even latency) is worse.
    - gf000 9mo ago
      Well, we are using much higher resolutions with much higher frame rates and with more media-rich content. You surely agree that not having a good compression here is less than ideal. And it begs the question whether this is indeed the task of the display manager, or it's packing an unrelated functionality that could be better solved by another software. And we haven't even gotten to sound - should a display manager now suddenly also handle sound?
      - saurik 9mo ago
        Of all the things that seem useful to conflate, audio and video does make sense to me, as they so often need to be synchronized. Hell: many monitors also support audio, all televisions do, and the cables used to connect them carry both signals.

jeroenhd 9mo ago

Microsoft's WSL2 GUI integration works based on Wayland (and XWayland): https://github.com/microsoft/wslg https://github.com/microsoft/wslg Rather than going fully protocol-based (like Waypipe), they used Weston to render to RDP. Using RDP's "remote apps" functionality, practically any platform can render the windows. I think it's a pretty clever solution, one perhaps even better than plain X11 forwarding (which breaks all kinds of things like GPU acceleration). I don't know if anyone has messed with this enough to get it to work like plain old RemoteApps for macOS/BSD/Windows/Linux, but the technology itself is clearly ready for it.

johnny22 9mo ago

It is in freebsd's official handbook, and the openbsd folks have been playing around with it since 2023 at least https://xenocara.org/Wayland_on_OpenBSD.html https://xenocara.org/Wayland_on_OpenBSD.html I'm not sure how much farther along they are than that post though.